Mohammad Khatami

Mohammad Khatami (29 September 1943-) was President of Iran from 3 August 1997 to 3 August 2005, succeeding Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and preceding Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Biography
Mohammad Khatami was born in Ardakan, Yazd, Iran on 29 September 1943 to a family of Shia Muslim clerics and future politicians. Khatami would rise to local prominence as an ayatollah, and he chaired the Islamic Center in Hamburg, West Germany from 1978 to 1980, missing the Iranian Revolution. Khatami served in parliament from 1980 to 1982, served as Minister of Culture and Islamic Guidance from 1982 to 1986 and from 1989 to 1992, and a member of the Supreme Council of the Cultural Revolution. In 1997, he was elected President of Iran as a reformist, winning a large majority of the vote; even in the conservative city of Qom, 70% voted for Khatami. Khatami's voters were leftists, businessmen eager to expand a free market, women, and younger voters, and he clashed with hardline and conservative Islamists due to his liberal views. His five-year plans helped with recovering the declining Iranian economy, and the GDP increased as unemployment fell. Khatami favored dialogue to clashing with other nations, and he narrowly avoided having to invade Afghanistan with 70,000 Iranian troops in 1998 after the massacre of 4,000 Shias in Mazar-i-Sharif by the Taliban; Ali Khamenei favored an invasion. In 2004, during the parliament elections, the conservative Guardian Council banned thousands of reformist candidates from running from parliament to sabotage the elections, and Khatami became a pro-democracy activist after leaving office in 2005.